The field of web operations is exciting. The career of a site reliability engineer is fascinating. In a single day, we can oversee datacenter cabinet installs, review a SAN fiber fabric, troubleshoot an 802.11ad link aggregation problem, tune the number of allowed firewall states in front of the web architecture, review anomalistic database performance and track it back to an unexpected rebuild on a storage array, identify a slow database query and apply some friendly pressure to engineering to "fix it now," recompile PHP due to a C compiler bug, roll out an urgent security update across several hundred machines, combine JavaScript files to reduce HTTP requests per user session, explain to management why attempting a sub-one-minute cross-continent failover design isn't a "good idea" on the budget they're offering, and develop a deployment plan to switch an architecture from one load balancer vendor to another. Yowsers!
The part that keeps me fascinated is witnessing the awesomeness of continuous and unique collisions between theory and practice. Because we are responsible for "correct operation" of the whole architecture, traditional boundaries are removed in a fashion that allows us to freely explore the complete pathology of failures.
Pursuing a career in web operations places you in a position to be one of the most critical people in your organization's online pursuits. If you do it well, you stand to make the Web a better place for everyone.
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